Concrete can be one of the most durable building materials and structures made of concrete can have a long service life. Concrete is a composite construction material composed primarily of aggregate, cement, and water. Further, as it is used as liquid that subsequently hardens it can be formed into complex geometries and may poured either directly into formworks at the construction site. For large construction projects contractors order pre-mixed concrete, known as ready mix concrete, and this dominates sales with approximately 70% of the U.S cement use in 2014. However, approximately 4% of the U.S. cement sales in 2014 were through building materials dealers such as national chains such as Home Depot™, Lowes™, Payless Cashway™ etc. to local and regional building material suppliers. With a total U.S. cement market in 2014 of approximately 90 million metric tons this represents 3.6 million metric tons of cement sold in a range of bag sizes from 20 kg to just over 40 kg. Assuming 33.3 kg average bag weight this represents the equivalent of 30 bags per ton or approximately 110 million bags of cement. In addition to these cement sales there were also additional sales of bagged concrete and mortar on top of these figures.
These are used in a wide range of projects including residential and commercial structures subject to planning permission and other municipal/state/national requirements. However, whilst quality controls are applied by the manufacturers and constructors with ready mix concrete no such controls are generally applied when bag cement is used. This arises as, whilst testing techniques for concrete have evolved and will continue to evolve to meet requirements for faster construction, shorter durations of formwork use, and cost reductions, many of these techniques require samples be taken, fully extended curing of the concrete achieved and laboratory measurements/testing performed. Typically, even the simple mechanical tests such as the slump test are not performed on site.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide building owners, insurers, contractors, regulatory authorities, architects, and others with data regarding the cure and performance of concrete made on site with bagged cement or bagged concrete mixes. It would be further beneficial for the necessary measurements and calculations to be automatically performed with a self-contained data acquisition/logging module added to the concrete which wirelessly communicates to a portable electronic device during installation and/or during lifetime of the concrete structure formed.
It would be further beneficial for such automated testing/characterization using self-contained data acquisition/logging modules to be employed/compatible with other products during their manufacturing, deployment and lifetime.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.